What “Serial” Really Taught Us

The introduction to “Serial” told us that the show’s producers had flipped back and forth in their thinking about Adnan Syed’s guilt, and so would we.

Courtesy “Serial”

The final episode of the first season of “Serial”—the podcast to end all podcasts—came out this morning. The series has given us a lot to think about. Like other devotees, I’ve listened to many episodes more than once, felt sympathy for Adnan Syed and the loved ones of Hae Min Lee, confusion about Jay, and even more confusion about the cell-phone evidence. I’ve felt a listener’s kinship with the host, Sarah Koenig, and made jokes about MailChimp and the shrimp sale at the Crab Crib. “Serial” lured us in with the promise of a good story—a murder mystery given the “This American Life” treatment, but over an entire season, like an HBO drama. I got up at six this morning to listen to the conclusion. Long anticipated and much discussed, it was a major cultural event—even though by now we expected something closer to the mood of the “Sopranos” finale than to Sherlock Holmes.

Every episode began with the show’s contemplative theme and a prerecorded prison-call greeting, and we reflected, sadly, about the fate of a thirty-two-year-old man serving a life sentence, who may have been wrongfully convicted. The show presented us with the very best of what radio and podcasts can do. It provided listeners with the voices of the many people involved with the case, detailing accounts, ideas, memories. It made good-faith efforts to solve the dozens of small mysteries that were part of the big mystery—where people were on January 13, 1999, and what they were doing; whether there was a pay phone at a certain Best Buy; the implications of events at high-school dances. We felt like we were listening to a story, an entertainment, but in truth what we were listening to was much bigger than that.

In the beginning, Koenig, a “This American Life” producer, had wanted to do a spinoff podcast involving a story told over time. After a woman named Rabia Chaudry contacted her about her friend Adnan Syed’s case, which involved a defense attorney whom Koenig had written about in the past, Koenig investigated for a year and made it the basis of the first season. When the show began broadcasting, Koenig and the other producers were still gathering information. They knew they had enough for a great show, but they didn’t know how it would end. From the start, intentionally or not, the show was about doubt.

Ira Glass, in his introduction to “Serial” on “This American Life,” told us that “what really happened was actually much more complicated than what the jury heard,” and that “each week, we will go with Sarah on her hunt to figure out what really happened. And we will learn the answers as she does.” This implied that there was a thriller in the works, but he also said that the producers of “Serial”—Koenig, Dana Chivvis, and Julie Snyder—have “flipped back and forth” in their thinking about Adnan’s guilt, and so would we. When I talked to the producers in the “This American Life” office the week before “Serial” débuted, in early October, there was much discussion about the nature of truth and how, in a criminal investigation, you can uncover many facts that seem to point toward a suspect’s guilt or innocence, and then learn other facts that confuse it again. We cited examples: Snyder told me about the documentary “The Staircase,” which the producers of “Serial” had watched; I mentioned the 1994 William Finnegan piece “Doubt.” I also thought, both at the time and as I listened to “Serial” in the following weeks, about a jury I’d served as an alternate for, in a case involving a violent incident in which details and motives—like those in Syed’s case—were unclear. All of these cases involved considerable reasonable doubt about the suspect’s guilt. And all resulted in convictions.

In the course of “Serial,” we learned a huge amount of relevant information that proved inconclusive. Koenig managed to track down a woman named Asia McClain who could have provided an alibi for Adnan, but the discovery was legally useless. Koenig and Chivvis learned that Mr. S., the person who found Hae’s body in Leakin Park, was a suspicious character with tenuous connections to both Hae and Adnan, who, it seemed, for a minute, might have known that the body was there to discover. But in the end it appeared that Mr. S. was, in fact, just a boozy streaker who happened upon the body, possibly while running naked though the woods.

Every episode was like that. Each character, central or fringe, was at worst odd, human, and even endearing; most of them were a little flawed, but no one was sinister. Jay, the chief witness for the prosecution, who testified that he had helped Adnan bury Hae’s body and who led the police to her car, also sold drugs, liked punk rock, and worked at a porn video store. He had provided conflicting stories about the details of the murder and his involvement several times. But he came across as a sympathetic outsider, not a thug, and as someone who was deeply uncomfortable with murder. He seemed genuinely traumatized by his involvement. And if he was involved, wasn’t Adnan? Who else could it have been? Many of us found ourselves feeling, or “believing,” an impossible logical tangle: that Jay helped bury Hae’s body, that Jay did not kill Hae, and that Adnan did not kill her either. We liked them both too much to believe otherwise. Just about everyone interviewed on “Serial” likes Adnan—even those who think he’s guilty. Even, we learned today, Don, Hae’s boyfriend and LensCrafters co-worker, thought Adnan was a good guy.

This morning, the twelfth and final episode, “What We Know” (spoilers follow), revealed that, in the end, the “answers” in “Serial” were much like those in “Doubt” and “The Staircase.” The episode had several amazing revelations. Koenig was finally able to interview Don. (He didn’t want to be on the show, so she read his comments to us.) Don seemed like another good egg. He loved Hae and admired her confidence. His seemingly airtight alibi was undermined a bit when we learned that his manager at LensCrafters that day had been his mom. He and Adnan had chatted amiably after coming to advise Hae after she got in a minor car accident the month before her murder—no hotheads, no jealousy, nothing untoward. And, rather stunningly, Don had not tried to contact Hae after her disappearance—a behavior that in Adnan’s case had seemed deeply suspicious, implying that he knew she was dead. This seemed to make Adnan less guilty. Koenig also talked to Josh, Jay’s porn-video-store co-worker, who provided details about Jay’s fear and anxiety the week of the murder, seeming to implicate Adnan—or, at least, the “Middle Eastern” guy whose name he didn’t quite know, but who had gone to prison. Snyder and Chivvis did more research into cell-phone practices of 1998 and learned that the incriminating “Nisha call” could indeed have been a butt dial. More reasonable doubt. Deirdre Enright, of the Innocence Project, called with exciting news about a serial killer who had been in prison in Baltimore and who had a “tiny window of being out and about” in January of 1999, when the murder took place. She and her students were filing a motion to have DNA from the scene tested, and Adnan wanted it tested too. “There’s nothing about my case that I’m afraid of,” he said.

Episode twelve conclusively proved that what we’ve been listening to is not a murder mystery: it’s a deep exploration of the concept of reasonable doubt, and therefore an exposé, if unwittingly so, of the terrible flaws in our justice system. Those among us who deign to be jurors, and don’t try to wriggle out of jury duty, too often don’t understand reasonable doubt, or can’t convince fellow-jurors about what it truly means. We convict people who haven’t been proved guilty because we feel that they are guilty. We feel that they’re guilty in part because they’re sitting in a courtroom having been accused of a terrible crime. In cases like this, the burden often ends up on proving the accused’s innocence—not innocent until proven guilty. And Adnan Syed is just the tip of the iceberg.

Many dozens of defendants are convicted or take pleas in the face of similarly inconclusive evidence. Adnan Syed, unlike many people who are convicted, was well-off; he was popular and beloved, with an incredible amount of support from his family, his mosque, his school. He had a passionate and respected attorney whom he still respects and appreciates, long after her disbarment and her death. Thousands of others do not have such support. Innocent or not, they are even easier to convict.

Koenig’s conclusion? In the end, she said, the only real piece of evidence against Adnan was that Jay was able to lead the police to Hae’s car—and that wasn’t enough to send a seventeen-year-old kid to prison for life. “As a juror, I vote to acquit Adnan Syed,” she said. As a person, she has doubts. That’s an essential distinction. “I feel like shaking everyone by the shoulders like an aggravated cop,” she says. “ ‘Just tell me the facts, ma’am.’ Because we didn’t have them fifteen years ago, and we still don’t have them now.”

Facts can only tell you so much; laws are meant to protect us all from the misapplication of facts, power, and force. “Serial” gave millions of people what felt like a personal connection to the realities of criminal prosecution, and it happened to come at a moment of heightened cultural awareness of the many injustices of that system, in part because of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Akai Gurley, in part because of growing awareness of the need for prison reform, even in part because of shows like “The Wire” and “Orange Is the New Black.” As a public-defender friend of mine put it, “Terrible things have been happening for a long time with all of us not being aware of it. People go to jail whether they’re innocent or not. You can’t divorce ‘Serial’ from that.” The thing that’s important about “Serial,” he went on, is “not that that dude’s story is unique—it’s that it’s prosaic.”

Sarah Larson is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her column, Podcast Dept., appears on newyor­ker.com.